5/26/2023 0 Comments Capital book thomas pikettyReflecting on the work of the American economist Simon Kuznets, Piketty’s most proximate forebear, Piketty writes, somewhat injudiciously: Rather, it was that their debates were ‘debates without data’. According to Piketty, the error of these thinkers was not in their thinking, as such. Piketty finds valuable principles in these authors’ works – for example, Smith’s principle of scarcity or Marx’s idea that capital accumulation tends toward the infinite. The mathematical formulae he studied and produced in his professional youth have, in his view, led economics astray, condemning it to serve as an idle abstraction at best and an apology for predatory neoliberal practices at worst.Ĭapital in the Twenty-First Century begins with a recovery of names that are today more dear to historians than to most economists: Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Piketty’s work heralds the return of political economy as the centerpiece of economic analysis and, along with it, the historical perspective such an analysis demands. Near the end of the introduction to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty writes: ‘In my mind, this book is as much a work of history as of economics.’ In the commentary that has surrounded the book’s meteoric appearance, this has emerged as a predominant theme.
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